I just tried my DE10-Nano board with the L.T.E power supply and also powering the otg usb hub. And all the HDMI cables work. So I was wrong in my previous comment about the L.T.E power supply being not good enough. I did not think that I should provide direct power into the usb otg hub because I don't do that when I use them with a couple of Raspberry Pi Zero's that have a webcam and wifi adapter plugged into the otg usb hub.

Now I have learned how to correctly power my DE10-Nano I need some help with ao486\PC, Amstrad and ZX Spectrum cores.

The ao486, PC core sometimes hangs for seconds on a MS-DOS prompt after booting from a Windows 95 floppy disk .img or a hard drive(.VHD file) formatted with system files to boot by itself. I create a 4096 MB .VHD file in Windows 10 Disk Management. I mount the VHD, initialise it as MBR and format it as FAT32. Then I copy Windows 95 and Windows 98 setup files to the mounted VHD hard drive. After that I unmount the VHD file and copy it over to the Mister SD card. When I try Windows 95 or 98 setup It stops before it goes into a graphical vga mode and returns to the command prompt.

The Amstrad computer core goes no further than a blank white screen and does not show the Amstrad CPC boot screen with BASIC prompt.

The ZX Spectrum does not go beyond a blank screen and does not show any of the different ZX Spectrum boot screens. I have tried ALT+F1 to F4 to change machine type.

I have a IO board and RTC board plugged into my DE10-Nano. The SOC chip is cooled by a heatsink and a fan. Main display is a crt vga monitor.

I used the updater script to download all the cores, files and put them in a directory tree which did not putfiles in the root of the SD card.

For the Amstrad core there is \Amstrad\boot.rom was found by looking at the debug output from the usb serial port with the line 'Selected file Amstrad/boot.rom with 63201 bytes to send for index '. Link to all the Amstrad debug output https://pastebin.com/FFggc281

For the ZX Spectrum core the rom file is located at '_Computer\spectrum.rom'. Debug output included ''Selected file _Computer/Spectrum.ROM with 63467 bytes to send for index 0.0'. Link to all the ZX Spectrum debug output https://pastebin.com/3c8Nwsn4

Last edited by xav2075 on Sat Aug 10, 2019 10:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Putting spectrum.rom in the root of the SD card does not get it to work for me even though I can see from the usb com port debug output that spectrum.rom is found at the root at the SD card and gives it's file size in bytes: 66,713. So I put spectrum.rom file back to where the updater script put it - /_Computer/Spectrum.ROM. And in that latter location spectrum.rom is also found.

If I press ALT + F1 through to ALT+F6 for different Spectrum models i can see the changed resolution message pop up but again I don't see any of the Sinclair Spectrum boot screens. And if I press F12 I get the core menu in the centre of the screen.

ugh. When I right click on that link i gave and choose 'Save link as' I get a 66kb file. But when I just click on the link I get a 192kb file that now gives me a working ZX Spectrum core. Another -1 for me getting something wrong. But I thought everything should work from using the update script.

The ao486 PC core for me is unreliable and will not install Windows 3.11 or 95 or 98. All the installers fail back to a MS-DOS command prompt at the point where they would change from text mode to vga\graphics mode. Only Windows 95 and 98 .img boot disks work. MS-DOS 6.22 .img boot disks do not. Sometimes a MS-DOS prompt, booted from a Windows 95 or 98 version of MS-DOS, will freeze for many 10's of seconds.

I create a hard drive .vhd file on my games PC using Windows 10 - Disk Management. I initialise the partition as MBR and format it as FAT32. My boot0.rom file is 64b and boot1.rom is 32kb. I mount the vhd file in Windows 10 and copy Windows 3.11, 95, 98 installation files to it. Then I detach the .vhd file and copy it to the Mister SD card.

I have a heatsink and fan on my DE10-Nano board SOC chip. I have a IO board and RTC board plugged in.

I have no idea what could be causing ao486 core to not work without fault.

I'm having issues with Yoshi island on most recent snes core. Is something wrong with my de10nano or ram ?

there are blocks in random places, some of the spinner objects don't move. Yoshi heads glitch around. I've tried a few different versions. I'm gonna check my ram module in the mean time. Sometimes resetting the mister 'reboot' resets the issues. I have a heatsink and fan running. If I set the system to pal these issues also disapear but then the gameplay is slower of course.

I just tried Super Mario World 2 - Yoshi's Island with the SNES softcore. I played the game for a few minutes and I saw no video defects.

The SDRAM module connects to the DE10-Nano with a single long connector that connects to the GPIO header and also 2 pins that go to the Arduino header. It is possible for these 2 pins to bend out of alignment and so not go into the Arduino header. This happened to me once and it resulted in memtest constantly reporting errors every passing second. Also I have found that the FPGA System On A Chip needs cooling by a fan, heatsink or both for memtest to run and report no errors. So maybe if the SOC chip is not getting cooling it could cause a softcore that needs the SDRAM module to be buggy. Link to memtest download > https://github.com/MiSTer-devel/MemTest_MiSTer

Also if you are using a usb otg hub for keyboard, mouse, games controller then you need to provide extra 5V power to it.

I ran memtest for maybe an hour, didn't have any errors. I'm using usb daughter board with it's own power supply. Sometimes the issues in Yoshis Island go away. So it doesn't always have glitches. This is with NTSC rom. I've tried Japanese one too, revisions 1 and 1.1 all sometimes have these glitches.

If I don't have any memory errors, is it possible it's just bad de 10 nano? I've only had for a couple weeks.

Ashenshards wrote:I ran memtest for maybe an hour, didn't have any errors. I'm using usb daughter board with it's own power supply. Sometimes the issues in Yoshis Island go away. So it doesn't always have glitches. This is with NTSC rom. I've tried Japanese one too, revisions 1 and 1.1 all sometimes have these glitches.

If I don't have any memory errors, is it possible it's just bad de 10 nano? I've only had for a couple weeks.

If I set to pal all the issues go away.

I played the game just now and no problems here. Maybe it's the screen? Since PAL seems to work fine for you... Do other games/cores have problems too?

With memtest press 'a' to run it at the maximum frequency. Which for me is 167mhz.

I want to repeat saying that I have to provide extra 5V power into my usb otg hub. I don't have the usb board that plugs into the DE10-Nano so I have no experience with it. But from what I have seen it gets power from the DE10-Nano and all of this is powered from the LTE PSU that comes with the DE10-Nano. I have to provide extra power in addition to the LTE PSU to avoid strange bugs such as 2 HDMI cables not working. If you look at earlier posts in this newbie thread you can see what problems I had and how I fixed them by using two 5V PSU's.

So after multiple mem tests errors are starting to show. Sometimes it runs for up to 4 hours with no errors. But on some boots I get errors immediately. I don't know how the test works but running it once for x hours is probably a bad way to test. Only on certain boots do I get tons of errors. This would explain the erratic Yoshi island glitches.

I stumbled across MISTer via a recent video by RetroManCave and got to say it really excited me. I would love to experience some of the 8-bit micros that I drooled over back in the day but never got my hands on. Atari 800, Sharp MZ80K, TRS-80 for starters. Games are great but I'm more interested in learning to program them in their BASICs and assembly languages, plus getting to know their hardware chips and peculiarities of how to make them "sing".

Just wondering, is anyone else doing this and if so what is the experience like? Is it practically the same as using the actual old hardware, support chips and all? Apologies for the newbie level of knowledge I have of the MISTer, and thank you for your time.